my understanding is that her magic ability was the network at play. idk if this is too conspiracy minded, but i assumed the train conductor who let her on without a ticket, hotel receptionist who gave her a room free of charge, etc. were all apart of the auld alliance
5 Likes
OOOh, I really like that. They said how small of a network they were, but I suppose if they had this plan, they could’ve executed it with relative ease.
3 Likes
brit says it’s hypnosis, but she seems to be just trying to retroactively justify how she was so taken in. & i guess that’s how i ultimately read it, that florence is sort of intentionally trojan-horsing astounding intelligence & forcing zombie bureaucrats into radical accountability via an unexpectedly young-looking shell. & people are some mixture of shocked & charmed so it works
2 Likes
oh damn that’s probably right
2 Likes
I found it interesting that, when we meet Richard, he’s a guy whose life is a bit of a mess, but he’s not too dissimilar from a lot of folks, in terms of having uncompleted dreams and whatnot, but he’s more or less living a ‘good’ life, even if it is one that ignores his daughter for twenty odd years.
But when we meet Brit, it is clear that her job is bad for her, bad for everyone. And yet, it is Richard who takes the steps to do better with his life, and Brit chooses to go back to her old one. You’d think that the person who could see the detriments of their current life on real, tangible people, would be the one to shake the dust off their old life and move on.
4 Likes
“As you well know, old lady, [telling you my story would] be the first step towards me vanishing altogether, she said. Because as soon as you hear me say anything about myself, I’ll stop meaning me. I’'ll start meaning you.
A murmer went through the crowd.
My mother told me, they’ll want you to tell them your story, the girl said. My mother said, don’t. You ar enot anyone’s story.” 229
There is definitely something happening here with ‘story,’ what each character’s is and what access to other’s they have. Florence throughout the book never reveals her true story to any other character or the reader. This is so clearly intentional, but I do not fully understand why… any thoughts?
7 Likes
So then is Richard doing them a disservice by telling their stories? Or is his telling of the story, since it is coming from a third party, different than someone telling their own story?
2 Likes
for me there’s no better art form to open the lid on the human mind. it’s the most flexible form, really quite like thought itself.
as far as importing specific ideas from lit to music—lit has shown especially me the excitement of longform structural & thematic connection, recursion, repetition, digression, showing different ways things can point towards the world, ignore the world, absorb the world. showing you there are infinite ways of phrasing a thought. freeing & paralyzing both!
reading more than any other form forces you into someone else’s perspective. like empathy practice.
& then down to a more microcosmic level it just has you thinking about language a lot, & that’s for sure an important tool for figuring out what you think & feel, & then beginning to be able to articulate that through art of any format. to express your self. it takes practice & reading is one great way to work at it in my experieince!
6 Likes
i’d felt like we’re supposed to see his film as a service,
after all, this was the movie he chose to make instead of that dumbass sexed-up blockbuster
even if he was skeptical about the whole thing—but i did like that he went in trying to figure out how he felt about their efforts… the true spirit of essay. not to enter with a foregone conclusion. even if his resistance to some of their ideas did read to me as a bit cold
4 Likes
I literally just closed this ride and I’m trying to reconcile with the end -
I felt it ebbed back exactly how you say, @noahmarcus, “despondent, unattached”…
and I’m thinking back to the start of the book and the beginning to part 3 - and how freaking bleak I found part II to be in its beginning, and the choking desire for action it instilled in me, and the inaction I have felt reading forward till the end and Priti Patel’s (Home Secretary UK since 2019) disgusting words on the arrival of refugees on boats just yesterday… and the dark dark reality of it all.
This has been a wake-up-call-read for me, but a re-installing of the sense of ‘Oh dearism’ as to the future of Britain…
The brief allusions to hope by different characters: the blazer slogan, Alda and the network, and how that ties in p.271 with An Die Hoffnung and back to Paddy, and afterlives, and retributions (the case of the man who stole a stone from the burial site and returned it after much doom…)
I guess my question is how did people feel after reading Spring regarding hope?
3 Likes
not a big point of discussion, but a moment i loved was when ali smith uses just ‘!’ to express the rush of emotion that alda and richard feel when they connect (254). i personally felt the way time just stops from pure excitement and human connection. a beautiful moment & purely original way to express it!
7 Likes
zooming in to a tiny point in the heart!
4 Likes
to go back to the point about richard changing for the better, but brit returning to normal, i think part of the two going in such opposite directions despite both having similar experiences is the support systems they had. richard had paddy, who saw the best in him, and who inspired him throughout his entire career. he wanted to be better for her, even if she wasn’t there anymore.
on the other hand, brit didn’t have the same support system. she had josh, and her mother, and her work friends, but they were either also hardened by the system, or were convinced that the system (and therefore brit) could never be better. the only person who did see the best in her was florence, who brit felt she was betrayed by.
also, what did everyone think of the letter paddy wrote to richard? probably my favorite part of the entire book!!
7 Likes
I’m keen to look into what connection naming it the Auld Alliance (Scot and French for Old Alliance) and this in reality going back to 1295, between Scotland and France against England… Brexit? Scottish Independence?
/ Does it matter whether we are left knowing explicitly what the network operates towards (reuniting and rehabilitating refugees is what I understood, but it seemed vague?) - and is Florence herself being a refugee left with question-marks around it - and the several times we are reminded that her ethnicity brings the attitude of silence/ being overlooked (for the last time page 320 with the cameras not being able to identify her)
(the invisible /anonymous is then paramount in Richard’s film (the same names, the silhouettes) ‘A Thousand Thousand People’)
4 Likes
i hadn’t thought of this! that makes the end scene taking place on a battlefield even more interesting
2 Likes
ghosts from both sides of the battle watching what the country is coming to 272 years later
2 Likes
The part of the story that kept sticking in my craw was Richard’s relationship, or lack thereof, with his daughter. We see him begin the process of reaching out to her, and I want to believe that he will make the effort to get to know her. But I’m not certain he will.
4 Likes
I am going on the idea that how the story frames her in the end, is as a refugee, a category of human, often used to pit right and left wing parties against each other.
A poignant moment for me in part 3 that threw me back to your quotation on 229 is when the tourists (including actor dressed as ghosts) are taking pictures of the mother and daughter being violently separated — It made me think of the history of photography of Migrant photography used in the press, children at the forefront (the arresting image of 5 year old Alan Kurdi that circulated the world) to manipulate or inform the debate.
So I take Florence’s story is largely left untold, but her intelligence and sense of humour/wit is heavenly emphasised towards the purpose of humanising an individual who so often becomes a token/ a manipulated figure by the press.
6 Likes
i loved how richard’s daughter & florence’s mother were positioned symmetrically—each had an absence in their lives that the other could surrogately fill. but the resolution was asymmetrical… isn’t it always…
6 Likes
then in richard’s project, a thousand thousand voices, he extends the impulse to humanize, maybe as a subconscious response to all the unknowns about the girl who saved his life
5 Likes